


Outsider POV - Liese Kassmeyer - The Dollhouse Case

by Asuka Kureru (Askerian)



Series: The Landlord [10]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Forced Prostitution, Gen, Organized Crime, POV Outsider, Urban Fantasy, mentions of - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-10 02:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12901827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru
Summary: "So how the hell did the dollhouse case go in the end?"Liese's Hanese is almost nonexistent, but the Hanese detectives' Deutsch is worse, so they're all muddling through in Prussian. Which explains her double-take. She's almost positive she's not mixing up that word, but..."Excuse me, the what?"She's sitting with Detective Karla Hummel, who's the one who liaised with the Hanese guys back whenever, and she therefore has no idea why that makes Karla choke on laughter and her whisky."The -- small house for toy people?" one of the Hanese guys says hesitantly as Karla coughs hard enough to shake the table. "That is the right word, yes?"





	Outsider POV - Liese Kassmeyer - The Dollhouse Case

**Author's Note:**

> This fic happens about eight years after most of the main canon. Sevan would be around 34 by now.

"So how the hell did the dollhouse case go in the end?"

Liese's Hanese is almost nonexistent, but the Hanese detectives' Deutsch is worse, so they're all muddling through in Prussian. Which explains her double-take. She's almost positive she's not mixing up that word, but...

"Excuse me, the _what?_ " 

She's sitting with Detective Karla Hummel, who's the one who liaised with the Hanese guys back whenever, and she therefore has no idea why that makes Karla choke on laughter and her whisky.

"The -- small house for toy people?" one of the Hanese guys says hesitantly as Karla coughs hard enough to shake the table. "That is the right word, yes?"

" _Dollhouse_ ," Karla translates into Deutsch, and switches back immediately. "Oh my god, _you don't know that story_. Tell her!" she encourages the Hanese detectives, grinning with all her teeth. Liese purses her lips, gives the more awkward of the two a commiserating look.

(She thinks his name is Jianghong, but she may have heard wrong. She didn't catch the senior detective's name at all.)

"Okay," Liese says slowly. "I'm intrigued. How were dolls involved?"

The senior detective and Karla glance at each other; he smothers a grin, waves his hand. "Oh, dolls were not. You have heard of the Song family?"

"Triads?" Liese guesses. Considering it's a conference about international organized crime they're attending it's not exactly a hard one. "Sure."

"Very good. Then I will tell you the story -- wait. More drinks, then the story."

They get more drinks. Why not.

The guy makes a show of downing like half his pint, before smacking his lips and reclining in his seat like a wise grandpa at Christmas. Liese prepares herself for a tall tale with approximately seventy-percent bullshit content. 

"This is not about the Song family," he starts, intoning wisely. Karla snickers. "It may or may not have happened to--"

"Huang, come on. It was one of their tributaries, I forget the name."

"You are very annoying," Apparently-Huang says like he's just making a random observation about her hair color instead. "Yes, it was their tributary, who dealt mostly in casinos and secret whores." He shrugs it off, takes another sip. "Lots of very rich customers. They paid their bribes and hid their whores and we could do nothing but be polite."

Liese makes a commiserating grimace. The bribes problem in Berlin is not as bad, but it still exists.

"And then one night -- when was it, Jianghong, you have a better head for these things."

"April fifth, two-thousand twenty-two, at four thirty-five in the morning."

So, a year and a half ago. Liese nods. 

"At ... very early in the morning, so, we have a call, from the neighbors, you see. We have several calls, from many neighbors. Which say nothing about bullets and guns, but about maybe an earthquake or a bomb, they didn't know for sure, and so we go, with the firefighters and the medics and a great mass of people...!"

Karla is already snickering. Okay...

"And we go, and the casino house -- it's very big, you understand, almost a whole block's length, and five stories tall, and very elegant, and all its front is in the street in -- like sheets, when you unpin them from the string and you don't catch them and they fall onto themselves in folds. Just, the front of a building, melted in folds in the street."

Liese does blink at that one. She was trying to be blasé but she's failing there. "What kind of magic would -- didn't they have protections?"

Huang chortles. "Oh, they did! Big strong protections, best that dirty money can buy. And the whole of the house behind it -- the whole of it is _wide open to see_."

"... Hee."

"Everything -- the betting rooms and the offices and the parlors and the boss' office. Barely any dust. And the best is -- the walls, they have been _moved_. They have been moved just right so the floors don't fall and the ceiling doesn't move, but all the mafia people are trapped in between."

"It was seriously impressive on the pictures," Karla confirms. "Like a dozen toughs pinned between two walls just enough so they couldn't move but could still breathe, their boots buried in the floor -- and like, there wasn't a single still-working weapon in the entire house, secret stockpiles included."

"Jesus. The _control_. Did that happen all at once?"

"Maybe over three minutes. The muscle were still trying to run out to see when the walls caught them."

Liese shakes her head slowly. "An entire city block in under three minutes. Jeeeesus. That's a really good team." She pauses -- Huang's face is casually amused still but the look that passes on Jianghong's face... "Or a really scary new player."

"We do not know for sure," Huang says casually. "But a lot of the patterning left on the floor, inside the stone, was the same, worked in the same direction, and the energy felt similar to our sensitives before it dissipated, even if... There were strange things. Too many sources. Maybe twins?"

"Anyway," Jianghong adds, "no other attack of that scale has happened since then, and we've been asking. We asked Detective Hummel back then, but..."

Liese arches an eyebrow; Karla shrugs. " _Guess_ who'd been to their casino like two weeks ago, and is also a mage."

Yeah, with that disgusted-tired face she's pulling, it's not really a question. Man's been a thorn in her side for a decade and a half by now. "Rolph Manders."

"Rolph _fucking_ Manders," Karla confirms. "But he was very much in Berlin when the dollhouse thing went down, and besides his magical signature is nothing like that and he doesn't have even half the oomph. Also he'd have brought the whole house down, or at least localized sections of the roof onto well-chosen people, it wasn't his style at all. It's not the style of anyone who works for him actually."

"It's not the style of anyone who wanted the boss dead just then," Huang says. "It is the style of someone who wanted us to come in to rescue all those people and find a lot of things doing so. And yet he is still dead now, and before that he was ruined and his patrons were so very disappointed with him, and a lot of their men are still in prison from all the things we found. Not as many as should be," he adds with a tone that should sound philosophical, but is a bit too hard for him to mean it, "but good enough."

Liese nods again. It's a good story -- some spectacular means, a still-running mystery, and the only victims were criminals.

"Some of the whores were gone," Jianghong adds quietly, playing with his glass. "The others... They had scars and their stories were -- not good -- but they didn't know either, they saw nothing because all the lamps blew. They say men came in and took the other whores away."

Liese's eyebrows go up encouragingly. "Yeah? Did they have anything in common? Identifying signs?"

"One of the men spoke some other language, but all the whores were Hanese, or at least half, and none of them were heard replying. And all of them had mage-work done on them, but maybe not the same, or not as much..."

"How many?"

"Three. Not related. So it can't be a relative paying to have them rescued."

"Maybe several families pooling up their money?" Karla suggests. "That kind of assault would cost a pretty penny."

"Maybe," Jianghong says, and shrugs.

And Liese...

Liese starts breathing again.

Three Hanese women who've had mage-work done on them, a year and a half ago.

"What kind of mage-work?" she asks as idly as she can.

Karla and Huang are already gone onto a tangent about the local families and the repercussions of the loss of face and money, but Jianghong answers obligingly. "Oh -- silver and pearls, tree leaves, flowers -- pretty things, right?" 

"Huh. Yeah. Makes sense. Pretty things."

Pretty things.

She pulls out her phone and leaves herself a note to check the whereabouts of Mikhail Kirillovich Lazarev a year and a half ago, if she finds the time. 

But Lazarev isn't a mage.

"Okay, spill," Karla tells her with a close-mouthed smile the second they're in the elevator, and Liese hesitates. 

It was a great story, and the Hanese criminals are dead or in prison -- but that doesn't mean there's no one left to avenge the insult, and there's no way to know who's on the take, in another country's police station.

But Karla won't tell, even though she got along with Huang, because she gets that.

"Remember when Rolph Manders had a full-body bionic user as his enforcer?"

"... Yeah?"

"And remember when we turned around and he'd shacked up with some college kid and gone straight?"

Karla scoffs. "Almost enough to make me believe in fairytales. Didn't the kid start, like, collecting them or something?"

The elevator stops. Liese doesn't start talking again until they're safely in their room. 

"They have an association now. Official oversight and dedicated social workers, a couple pro bono lawyers, the works. Golem rescue."

Karla's eyes widen. "Rescue -- you don't mean..?"

"I mean that in -- two thousand seventeen? Maybe, maybe earlier? There was a rash of bionic users beating up Rolph's people, and then there was _nothing_. No retaliation. Nothing. And in the middle of that you have a mage they call _my lord_."

"And two weeks after Rolph visits the casino -- oh my _god_."

Liese sits on her bed, hands planted behind her. "Uh huh."

"How -- what the _fuck_ kind of trade -- think Manders is using the place as a front?"

Strangely enough, Liese doesn't think so. "I interviewed the college guy once," she says slowly, thinking. "One of his bionics guys had been beat up and thrown out of a car on his doorstep. Really bad liar, really nervous, really not used to that shit. But like, pretty infatuated with Lazarev." 

"Maybe he offered his services in exchange for the guy?"

"And Manders waited seven years to cash it in? Nah."

"Mn. Yeah." Karla frowns, dropping onto her own bed, and rests her chin onto both fists to brood.

"There is _no way_ he didn't sic them on the triad guy, though," Liese says comfortingly, and woo are the drinks catching up to her finally. "No fucking way. I would bet a _hand_ that the transformation imprint on that street full of fucked-up cars back then would match the casino. And about a fourth of College Guy's golems have done time for battery or worse, and a full half of them were thieves of _some_ kind, too, and about _ninety percent of them_ ping me as ex-military--"

She's on her phone, searching for _golem bionics association berlin_ as fast as her fingers will type.

"So... You think we're dealing with a minor boss for Manders? Secret backup?"

Liese opens her mouth to say she doesn't know.

 _The Vindilov Story_ is one of the tabs on their homepage.

One of Sevan Bauer's ancestors was Varvara Diamondhand, who led three separate rebellions against Tsars and Byzantine emperors and _won_ , who died on a battlefield at age ninety-two, and another one Gaioz Devil's Hand, who died in his bed at seventy-seven after causing a terrifying number of people to die horribly first.

Bauer is rated a triple-twenty-five on the Alexandria scale and has an engineering doctorate. 

His speciality is workflow optimisation and mass-production machinery, but there's no way he doesn't have some idea of how to make a house stay up. Even if he has moved the load-bearing walls around.

"I think," she says slowly, staring at the tiny grinning picture imbedded in the article and telling herself she is drunk after all, "I think that I really don't fucking think so, and thank at least three pantheons for that."

Tomorrow they'll be back in Berlin. It's not her beat anymore, but she makes a note to drop by, for old times' sake.


End file.
